The invention relates to a medical apparatus and in particular a machine for extracorporeal treatment of a fluid, i.e. a patient's blood.
As is known, machines for treatment of blood, such as for example machines for treatment of kidney failure or liver insufficiency or machines for plasmapheresis, i.e. machines for other types of fluid treatment, are provided with special means for treating a fluid in general comprising appropriate sensors and actuators which enable the cited treatment to be carried out.
In general all the above-mentioned machines have in common a presence of a control unit which is destined to send control signals and to receive data from the sensors and/or actuators for monitoring and controlling the treatment.
Obviously for interaction with the machines, the operator can provide commands to the control unit, as well as view machine data and parameters in order to monitor its functioning.
To this end, usually at least a device for entering data is included which can be constituted by a keyboard, a mouse, suitable buttons and activations, or even a touch screen; there is also always a special display for visualising the data requested received from the sensors and/or relating to the actuators.
As the above concerns medical machines, those briefly described above are provided with special device for generating and managing alarms and signals which relate to a plurality of levels and different types of alerts.
For example, document US 2003128126 describes a medical machine in which an alarm condition detector establishes the presence of a risk situation and an alarm controller generates the alert signal.
The alert signal is directly correlated to the importance of the alarm that has gone off, and can be pre-configured as an audio alarm, or a flashing or coloured light alarm, or an e-mail message alarm, a local network message or even a telephone call to a doctor/operator.
Document US 2002099283, also relating to a medical system for monitoring the to value of blood coagulation measured in a patient teaches notifying a technician, i.e. a doctor, etc., via various types of message such as telephone, e-mail, normal post etc., according to the urgency and type of message to be sent.
Devices for management and despatch of signalling messages, as briefly described above, though well achieving the aims they set for themselves, are however affected by some operating limits and/or drawbacks and have shown themselves to be susceptible to improvement under various aspects.
Firstly, devices for managing and sending signal messages are non-configurable (or in any case are hard to configure) if not during the stage of predisposition of the machine, and typically by a specialised technician.
In general, on verifying the situation of danger the known system automatically implements the signals paired with the type of alarm.
The nursing staff, doctors or patient cannot usually intervene rapidly on the medical machine to manage or configure signalling of an alarm in a way which is most suited to a particular situation that has arisen.
Further, known systems do not enable, if not a priori, establishing a type of despatch and the correct target (in terms of expert personnel) of a signal, nor is it usually possible to intervene in order to vary and/or implement the information sent.